Guest Columnist By Ofovwe & Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede
Every act of giving begins, whether the giver knows it or not, with a theory of change. A quiet belief about how the world actually moves. Some give to relieve a symptom: the empty plate, the unpaid school fee, the absent roof. That work is both noble and necessary. But over the years, we have come to hold a different conviction: that the biggest and most durable change in Africa will not come from treating symptoms one at a time. It will come from the people we equip to repair the systems that produce them.
That conviction is the thread that runs through everything we do — through the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation, through our wider philanthropic ventures, and now through our work as Co-Chairs of The King’s Trust International Africa Advisory Board. We did not arrive at it by accident.
Our Unfashionable Bet
One of us spent a career in finance, helping to build Access Bank into one of Africa’s largest financial institutions, and learned a hard lesson in the process: you can build a great business, but it cannot rise sustainably above the quality of the society and institutions around it. If the state is weak, the ceiling will always be low.
